


At The Edge of Still Water

by silentflightfeathers



Series: Bakery No Jutsu AU [1]
Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Fix-It of Sorts, I just like birbs, It's Not Paranoia If They're Really Out To Get You, Itachi is a crazy person, M/M, My cranky pretty murder boys, Shisui Sage Mode, The crows are actually the protagonists, Uchiha Shisui Lives, You all signed up for this ride, for surfacage, not much fluff, we all knew that already, weeee
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-02-24
Updated: 2018-06-23
Packaged: 2019-03-23 05:12:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,196
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13780434
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/silentflightfeathers/pseuds/silentflightfeathers
Summary: Shisui wakes up to blackness and a quiet riverbank.Shisui wasn't supposed to wake up at all.





	1. Blind

**Author's Note:**

  * For [surfacage](https://archiveofourown.org/users/surfacage/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Water Death](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12358107) by [blackkat](https://archiveofourown.org/users/blackkat/pseuds/blackkat). 



> For Surfi, because your art first got me into Naruto and the world of fanfic.
> 
> This is a prequel to my previous fic Bakery No Jutsu. I found, in order to write Shisui and Itachi with any justice, I needed to headcanon how Shisui could be alive. As that story went on, I was more and more attached to this one. So here it is: the Prequel No Jutsu. The crow’s name is Hane- pronounced “Hah-ne”, or feather in Japanese. (If I just botched that, please tell me). Shisui didn’t name his crow after an underwear brand, I promise.

Shisui woke up to black. It was wrong.

It was wrong because  _ Shisui wasn’t supposed to wake up at all. _

“ _...Fuck.” _ The word came out in a gasp as his empty sockets howled at him, his broken— broken? Certainly broken, his nearly-depleted chakra couldn’t have saved him from that kind of fall— leg screeched with the pain of one bone being three, his bruised and battered hands dug at the rocky bank in an attempt to drag himself the rest of the way out of the Naka River. 

He couldn’t blink, his eyelids encrusted with the blood that the river hadn’t washed off of his face. He knew he couldn’t see, but his brain kept trying anyway- flashes of painful red-black-white from his torn optical nerves keeping up a strobe with the unpleasant snap-tug-crunch of the muscles in his thigh around the edges of his fractured femur.

How far had the river taken him? Was he far enough away from the village… he contemplated jumping back in and forcing the river to finish the job.

Then again, if the gods didn’t want him the first time around, chances are they wouldn’t want him the second time around, either. But he was vulnerable here, and without his Sharingan he had little chance of telling if anyone was nearby. Shisui made one last pull, felt the cold water drain off of his toes, and forced himself onto his back. His hands flickered through seals and his favorite summon, a small crow he called  _ Hane _ puffed into existence on his chest, her beak running over his shaking fingers and exploring his mutilated face. She shuffled over him and croaked quietly, asking.

“Hey, pretty,” he said. “Go be a lookout for me, will you?” 

The crow hopped once, her toes digging into him as she readied herself, and then her wingtips slapped him as she took off, cawing. Shisui pushed himself half-upright— and  _ how _ had most of him escaped being splattered against the water’s surface— and reached into the pouch at the small of his back. He had a small med kit, wraps, food pills, things to stitch himself up. Things to numb his entire broken self- the throbbing was increasing as he kept moving and his body warmed up. The wraps he ignored- he didn’t have any lacerations, and he didn’t have any branches to brace his leg with, so what good would they be? He swallowed a food pill and ignored the sharp stab in his eye sockets moving his jaw caused. The chakra boost would help. Next was the general anesthetic, which he lay back down- only partly so he didn’t crack his skull on the rocks- to enjoy as a tingling numbness diffused the screaming pain in his skull and leg.

The next thing he did was pull the hitai-ate off of his forehead. 

Danzo, trusted and revered village elder,  _ had betrayed him. _ Hunted Shisui, a loyal shinobi of the Leaf, like he was an enemy. Like he wasn’t even  _ human. _ He took a minute to contemplate whether or not Danzo had acted with the blessing of the Hokage— thought about the ANBU he’d fought with Itachi, years before— before he stuck his fingers between the cloth and the metal and  _ yanked. _ Konoha’s leaf made a soft  _ plunk _ as it hit the water and he tied the cloth over his ruined eye sockets. 

_ Never again, _ he promised himself.  _ Never fucking again. I died today—  _ fuck, was it still today—  _ and I’ll fucking Stay. Dead. _

He hoped Itachi used his eye to force the clan to back down. Hoped the kid understood  _ why _ he gave him a mangekyo Sharingan that powerful. Hoped he wasn’t a  _ giant idiot _ to give his eye to an impressionable kid like Itachi- and he  _ liked _ Itachi. But Itachi was a pacifist, Itachi knew he wanted to keep the peace between the clan and the village, Itachi was a fucking  _ genius strategist _ who could think his way around any opponent. He would figure it out. 

He would figure it out.

_ He would have to fucking figure it out. _

“Shut up, asshole.” He snarled at himself. “You’re dead, just worry about getting off of this fucking riverbank.”

It took him three days and several pieces of driftwood, but Shisui got off that riverbank. His leg was broken, his eyes were gone, and he had a crow perched on his head to give him directions because he couldn’t fucking  _ see _ , but he left the river, Itachi, Danzo, and his village behind.

~!~

 

“Sake,” the stranger croaked, his smile crooked and his eyes wrapped in black fabric. There was a crow perched on his head and a cane in his hand. “Please. And water for my friend, if I may.”

The bartender poured the sake as the man and bird engaged in a complicated dance of maneuvering him to the bar- the bird would hop to one side or the other of his head, and the man would move to follow. Sometimes the bird would snap at a curl and tug, if it wasn’t satisfied with his progress. “Stop that, Hane, I’m going,” he would say then, his voice patient and humorous. 

The bartender set down the sake and a dish of water as the man sat. He noticed the chest brace and the tanto strapped to it, but these were rough lands. Being armed was only wise. He added a plate of small crackers to the spread and directed a gesture to the crow. “Here you are.” The crow muttered and hopped down to nip at the man’s fingers until he had them wrapped around his sake before turning to its water and snacks. 

“That’s quite the bird,” he said with a smile.

The man grinned in his general direction. “She keeps me in line,” he said, and the bartender realized that the scruffy man in front of him was ten or twenty years younger than he’d thought.  _ He’s just a kid. Sixteen, tops. _ He added a bowl of miso to the table. “On the house,” he said. “For the entertainment.”

“Thanks,” was the grateful response. “Hane, leave off. You have your own.” 

The bartender smiled at the fussing bird and turned to his other customers. The man- the boy- and his crow settled quietly into their place. The bar’s chatter picked up, its patrons no longer entertained by the seeing-eye corvid. 

“Is that the latest copy of the bingo book?” from one less-than-sober shinobi with his back to the wall. The jonin he was sitting by nodded and kept flipping pages. “Any new bounties?”

The jonin grunted. “One big one. From Konoha.”

No one noticed when the crow perked up from its crackers and hopped onto its companions shoulder. Its head tilted in avian curiosity as it muttered quietly to itself, watching the shinobi in the corner of the room. The man finished his soup and picked his sake back up.

The voices lowered. “ S-rank criminal Itachi Uchiha. It says he slaughtered his entire clan in a single night.” 

“All of them? The entire police force?”

Everyone noticed when the sake cup clattered onto the bartop. “Sorry, sorry,” the blind man fumbled at the glass as the crow fussed and chittered at him. “Uncoordinated these days.” 

The bartender helped him clean up as the man tossed payment onto the counter, the crow back on his head. “Thanks for the meal,” he said with the same crooked grin he walked in with. The crow cawed its own thanks before it turned its attention to tapping directions into its friend’s scalp.

~!~

Shisui collapsed against a tree after he’d bolted out of the roadside inn, gasping and hissing as his leg creaked at him in protest. 

“ _ Fuck, _ Hane,” he said to his summon. “What the  _ hell?!” _

The crow croaked at him. 

“Some help you are,” he grumbled. 

CROAK.

“No, I don’t know  _ why. _ He was supposed to use it!”

CROAK CRO-AK.

“I’m fucking  _ blind! _ I’m supposed to be  _ dead! _ What the hell do you think I’m going to be able to do about it?!”

CROAK croak CrrrroAK. The bird nipped at the end of his nose, annoyed.

“Stop it, Hane!”

CROAK!

“I said sto—!”

A wrenching jerk and a sense almost like his abandoned Body Flicker technique, and suddenly Shisui was surrounded by a greater cacophony of crows than he’d ever encountered. Wingtips brushed him and claws dug into his shoulders, his arms and hair. Wind from hundreds of wings blended with the sort of wind that only blew when one was very, very high up. “Hane…” he said, “Hane, where are we?”

“You’re in our Forest, Uchiha boy without his Sharingan.” The voice was old. Old, gravelly croaks that echoed against the thick, twisted trunks of the trees that cast the cold, dappled shadows over his skin. Hane muttered deferentially next to his ear.

Feathers ruffled, the same sound Hane’s feathers made when she cocked her head to one side- but  _ bigger. _ Shisui bowed to the old sage crow. “My name is Shisui,” he said. 

The birds around him burst into cawing laughs. “We know,” the old sage said. The uneven ground trembled gently as the great crow hopped closer. “Hane has told us of your need. You need to avenge your clan.”

“... I have no eyes, Lord Crow… I can’t…”

A great beak ran gently over him, a quiet crow chuckle echoing in the great throat. Shisui reached up and ran his hands through soft feathers. The way the beak ran over him was familiar— “You’re blind!”

The growing murder cackled. “I do not let it stop me,” the Sage Crow said. “I am a Crow Sage. I can sense the energy of the things around me and fly wherever I wish.”

Shisui swallowed and knelt. “Lord Crow,” he began, his voice cracking, “my clan is dead. I am an Uchiha with no eyes, I have no power. Will you teach me Senjutsu so that I can avenge my clan?”

The great feathers ruffled, and a great rush of wings blew the sash off of Shisui’s face. “Yes,” the great crow boomed. “Yes, I will teach you, Uchiha boy.”


	2. Seeing

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Shisui gets used to life as a crow- and runs into someone he never expected.

Shisui stopped with his weight balanced on his toes. The outcropping he stood on had only  enough room for his two feet, the stone closer to the cliff top worn away by centuries of wind. One long and terrifying step had taken him from the dry weeds to the bare island of rock.  He was glad of his blindness: looking down was irrelevant. Feathers rustled in the air around him, and he shifted carefully, trying to track the crow flying around him. Hane cackled from her perch several yards away. Shisui put his hand up to block the sharp claws that had come for his face; wingtips brushed his palm as the bird wheeled away, chattering.

“Hane-chan, your Uchiha will not learn if you warn him every time,” the Sage Crow (whose name, Shisui had learned, was Yatagarasu) chided, his croak like the clatter of kicked pebbles. “Again.”

Shisui focused his mind, waiting for the faintest change in the air on his skin, listening for the slightest rustle of feathers. ‘You have allowed your senses to become still and dead, like a cave;’ he had been informed. ‘They must be sharpened before you can begin to train.’ So there he was perched on a tiny island of rock sticking out of the side of a mountain, crows flying at his face, his legs, wherever they found an opening. If they could land a scratch or a peck, it was a lesson. If he slapped them out of the sky instead of redirecting them gently, the crow sage would have him for lunch. If he fell off the rock to his death, they’d pick his bones clean for him and his clan would never be avenged.

It was a good incentive to improve quickly. He pivoted to block the crow aiming for the small of his back and gently brushed it with his fingers. It cackled happily, amused. “Good, good! Do better!”

Ugh. He sunk deeper, tuning out of his thoughts entirely as he would when he was tracking enemy nin. The harsh mountain sun beat down on him. His clothes stuck to his skin but the sweat made him more sensitive to changes in wind direction and air currents. Hane had gone silent, but he could hear the faint scratches of her claws on the rock as she shifted unhappily.

The air had grown cold, probably as the night set in. A greater rustle told him the Sage had stirred. The crows swerved away from him, and Shisui turned back to the cliff.

“Come down from there, Uchiha boy,” his teacher rattled. “We are not night-birds, and I am hungry.”

Hane fluttered to her customary perch on his head and tapped him back to the clifftop proper, where he stood, hands on knees, and waited for the solidity of standing on a landmass larger than a dinner plate to reassert itself. A great beak nudged itself past his arms and into his chest, he clung to it and the crow sage lifted him onto his great feathered back- he’d been carried up, and he’d be carried down, apparently.

~!~

Crows, being crows, had a varied diet. Shisui decided he did not need to know where the ingredients they brought him for dinner were… obtained, but he obliged when they cackled for him to cook on occasion.

It was cold on the mountain, after all, and feathers- like hair- burned too easily in a cooking fire. Even so, the threat of sparks didn’t stop a heavy beak from clonking the top of his head while he was stirring. Shisui sighed. He’d burned through the wood the crows had gathered- there were no more twigs to be found in the neat pile next to the stacked-stone fireplace, one of the few bits of proof that humans had lived on the mountain before him. He was glad of it, though. It was too dangerous for him to cook with an open fire.

“You know,” he mused, “if I had signed a contract with toads or snakes like the great Sannin, I bet I would not be hit in the head as often.”

The soft cackle reverberated through his bones. “The toads would hit you _more_ ,” Yatagarasu assured him. “And cover you in oil, like a pig in grease.”

“I suppose I can live with some bruises,” Shisui quipped back. He flipped the bits of meat he’d been stirring out of the pan- another human tool he’d been surprised to find on the side of a mountain humans supposedly didn’t know about- and into a large wooden dish, already full of vegetables. “Let it _cool_ this time,” he admonished. “Please.”

“Hrmf,” was the response. That, and a great many plips and plops as food was flung in every direction to be ravaged by the rest of the murder. Dinner involved a significant amount of squabbling, he’d learned. Shisui hoarded his own bowl, and Hane got whatever pieces she wanted out of it while her brethren descended upon the scattered tidbits. The sage finished what he had not thrown to the rest, ruffled his feathers, and hopped to what Shisui knew was a surprisingly comfortable nest atop a high stone stack.

His fingers found Hane’s chin, tucked up under his ear. “Nesting time, huh?”

She let out a rattle that in a songbird would have been a coo and tucked herself up under his jaw. Shisui spread the last few coals from the fire out across the flat stone and waited until he couldn’t feel any heat from them before retreating to the built-upon overhang the crows had shown him his first night. It was cozy enough, once he’d adjusted to it- certainly better than some of the accommodations he’d had on missions when he was younger- but he was beginning to feel like the old blind man who lived in a hut on the mountain. Crows were not much ones for creature comforts- stolen food notwithstanding- and, it seemed, neither was his predecessor. Still, he was restless. If this was the crow’s path to Senjutsu, it was not what he expected.

~!~

Some time later:

Shisui walked among the market stalls and dodged a crow aiming for his nose.

“It is time for something different,” the old crow had told him that morning. “So we will send you out among the people today.” The giant feathers ruffled haughtily. “It is time for you to be able to see an attack coming when you are surrounded by noise and distraction.”

Shisui had huffed. “So you’re going to dump me in the middle of a village and attack me in the middle of a crowd.”

He couldn’t see the great face- and crow faces were not given to mobility of mirth in the first place- but he could feel Yatagarasu laughing at him. “Yes.”

“I am going to look like a _lunatic.”_

“You will, of course, make sure none of the other humans harm our brethren.” He was informed with much smugness. “And also, find some of those delicious sweet dough bites. I would like some.”

“...yes, Sensei.”

He was somewhere near the sea, he knew. He could smell the brine and hear the seabirds chatter, and fish was the strongest smell in this market by far. He could dodge the market crowds easily enough, but wherever he went in he couldn’t detect very many food smells at all- not even rot or drying herbs.

“Wherever we are, Hane, I don’t think we’re going to find any pastry shops,” he muttered to the bird on his head. She clucked in agreement, and he sidestepped a crow aiming for his knees. Surprisingly, the mutters from the crowd never seemed to acknowledge the jumpy blind man with the bird on his head- not even one with feathers growing out of his scalp or talons sticking out of his sandals, because to see Shisui had to use his barely-mastered senjutsu. He dodged another crow and paused to listen to what he was hearing- _seeing- feeling- almost like his lost sharingan, but not quite..._

“NARUTO!!!”

He held up a finger, just barely, and Hane croaked at the other crows. Their claws ticked softly on the bamboo of the market stalls they landed on. Just… just _there._

Impossible.

“Shut up, _teme!”_

“Sasuke-kun!” A girl’s high voice.

There were other Sasuke’s in the world. He stilled completely and tested the air. Something sharp was on it- ozone. Ozone and _dog._ He froze, unable to move as the lightning inherent in an old comrade crackled over his senses, fire and anger at its heels.

“Sasuke, come on,” carried over the crowd.

He lost sage mode, his concentration broken. He had enough presence of mind to slip out of the crowd and hide in an alley.

He took deep breaths and stilled. The crows followed him down, familiar enough with Shinobi to know when a mission had gone wrong. He swallowed.

Sasuke was _alive. Sasuke was alive and Kakashi Hatake was his jonin instructor._

“Get us out of here,” he croaked.

They did.


End file.
